JB's Miscellaneous Ramblings

So, I need to be more organized. This has ALWAYS been the case, as far back as I can remember.

All these years later, I've finally been able to start putting in to words the problem with all the methods I've tried to try to help. (Other than: They don't help.)

They're all too hard to keep, well, organized, and there's NOTHING that works for me as a true universal capture device.

I have a 1st Gen iPhone, and a Nokia E71.
On each, it takes too long to get the phone out, unlock it, find and launch the note-taking app, and actually enter the note.
If I'm _driving_, when half of the things I've forgotten to do come to me, it's impossible.

If I have a voice recorder of some form, I never remember to transcribe it... I've discovered the notes months or years later, having forgotten about them by the time I finally get to a point where I could transcribe them.

My chosen platform is a mac, my work desktop is windows, my work is done on Linux. I drive my web-browsers hard enough that it can be slow to pull up (website of the day) to get something entered... and I'm not always carrying a machine with me. Go back to the problem with my phones.

If I write it down longhand - which I actually prefer for quick note taking, as trying I've let to find something that smoothly (and on all platforms) lets me put a blob of text here, another one there, and a 3rd alongside the 1st 2, easily.

I did a major diagramming project at my last job in dot (graphviz) because I knew if I got involved in laying out where the arrows and boxes went, I'd NEVER get data in to them.

If I don't get a note taken down quickly, it won't get taken down, and as I read someplace today, "If it's not written down, it doesn't exist."

Of course, once too much of it is written down, there's too much to deal with.

And how the FUCK do you pick out your 'next actions', anyway? (Ref: David Allen, Getting Things Done)

Being organized is not simply 'hard', it's pretty fucking near 'impossible', and this is getting to me.

How do you do it?

(Classic example: I was trying for a while to do a daily wrap-up and pre-org the next day's tasks... but it nearly always happened that I was busy at the wrap-up time, or suddenly it would be time to leave - with a deadline at the other end - and I'd have to not do it. Gah.)

I can name 4 people on my friends list right now with dead, dying, or critically ill relatives.

Gah. I'd really like to not see this as a trend, but it's hard.

{sigh}

I've got to make room to put more stuff in it...

This probably involves buying more shelves, setting them up, and trying to organize stuff.

As with oh-so-many things in my life these days, I really don't want to try doing this alone, but any amount of company/moral support, even if it doesn't involve much aid in the lifting/hauling/organizing realm, will help.

I'd be happy to offer same to you...

You just have to be able to deal with our basement. ... and with home despot or lowes or somesuch. :)

(There's another (meta-)post about the 3rd paragraph to follow /sometime/ in the future... but not now.)

Really, I've gotta get better about the feeling that, on any given night that I've got nothing happening and that others are not similarly at loose ends, that I'm being actively excluded from whatever it is that's happening.

Sadly, though, it's not nearly that easy, esp. when some of those things that are going on are things I'd really like to be included in.

I know... Space and invitation lists are not infinite, there are many things I'm NOT excluded from, and so on... but still, it's not easy.

{sigh}

... You see, my take on it is that the stickers/add-ons/etc. (at least when specific to the release in question) are part of the label/cover/zeitgeist and should thus be saved.

So, I've never had a really great time-sense. Was I doing something an hour ago? Was it 3 hours ago. Has 15 minutes just passed, or has it been 90?

That short-range stuff has gotten better, but the long-term time sense is deteriorating. Was that party 2 weeks or 2 months ago? Was I talking about that subject 3 months or 2 years ago?

Does anyone have any ideas on how to improve that sort of thing, with an emphasis on internal monitoring? I can write things down, but then going back and figuring out when I wrote something down is almost as annoying as remembering the original thing, especially if I don't know what timeframe I'm looking for the notes in.

Repeatedly I've pulled up my LJ client and then failed to post anything, though I initially had things I wanted to say.

This is mainly because I keep forgetting more than just a fragment of what I was going to say. More than once I've started a post and been unable to figure out how to make it say what I wanted.

This is all annoying.

So in lieu of real content, I give you a piece of music that I'm convinced that Tech Squares should be dancing to, esp. given our caller's musical proclivities.

Black Arabs - The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle: Anarchy in the U.K. / God Save the Queen / Pretty Vacant / No One is Innocent (Medley)

English needs seperate terms for "It is my fault and I apologize" and "I am unhappy in sympathy with your unhappiness".

Am I just showing a lacuna in my vocabulary?

I just figured out something: I'm attracted to thin women, as long as they're not "conventionally" attractive... you know, in the "societally", "fashionably" defined way... they (the "conventionally" attractive) just look bony and/or emaciated.

... which should not be taken by those thin women I've expressed attraction to as any sort slight, please. Thanks.

(Posting this is, in part, prompted by a foot-in-mouth sort of comment I made at P&F's party to someone...)

So there I was on Tuesday, getting my arm and shoulder massaged. After a while, my conscious brain realized that I'd been living in the world of "Duck Amuck", where my arm and shoulder were Daffy Duck and Cee was The Animator/Bugs Bunny.

First my arm and shoulder were a running body of water, and Cee was reshaping the banks and the speed of the flow and so on. Sometime later, my shoulder and arm were a tree and limb, and Cee was the wind and the creator...moving things one way and another, reshaping the way I was growing, and such. Various points in between, I was various other things, with my reality being changed/shifted by some force I wasn't in control of.

I was quite a revelation when I realized what was going on. It was really strange...and yet quite amazing.

A) If you care, http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=jbsegal&itemid=7951 has various of my comments on folks comments on my stuff. Yeah, right.

B) So, I'm sitting at corwin and Cecelia's, vegging out for a bit and I pick up a book. Nick Bantock's _The_Forgetting_Room_. What's it turn out to be about? Someone who inherits his grandfather's house and has to go and look at all of his stuff, and process it and deal with it, and such. The timing was...well, amazing.

B') Eternal memorials: I want to endow an etched-on-something-like-titanium copy of The Phantom Tollbooth to live attached to a bench in Mt Auburn Cemetery for any wandering passerby to partake of. Anyone know where to start looking for a 'printer' to produce this?

B' ') Mt. Auburn Cemetery is a /beautiful/ place. I recommend it to everyone.

Remember last night, when I posted something totally inconsequential about dragoncon? Well, this is what I /meant/ to post...

I like my stuff. This is good, because I have a lot of it. Many people have commented, over the course of the move, that I have a lot of stuff. That I should get rid of some/much/all of my stuff. That there's too much of it.

I disagree, and quite honestly, I'm getting tired of hearing it.
(That said, I quite sincerely want to thank everyone who, no matter what their feelings on my/our stuff, helped me/us pack and move it. It was really unpleasant, but without the help it would have been truly hellacious. A million thanks, and we still owe you dinner.)

My stuff is many things to me. One of them being memory. I have a lousy memory in many many cases. Ironically, considering what I'm doing right this very second, I've always been a wretched diarist. I'm a poor corespondent. I just don't write much. This means that I don't have a written trail of what I've done over the years, mostly. This means that I would lose huge tracts of my past - or more accurately, be unable to bring them to the surface - without the reminders my stuff provides me.

( Insert Appropriate Lyrics Here )

Some people might find this sad, but I'm ok with it. There is, perhaps, a weakness to relying on so much external paraphernalia...in the case of a devistating fire/flood/chasm opening in the ground, I'm fucked...and perhaps I would discover how much I'm capable of remembering without my stuff...but as it stands, I don't see the need to practice this.

Yes, it's a pain to move. Yes, it means I need to spend more money on living space, because I need, as George Carlin so aptly put it, long before he became so cynical and rant-filled, a place for my stuff. (Of course, he was wrong when he noted "How can you want Everything In the World? You'd have no place to put it!", as part of 'Everything In the World' would include all the closet/cabinet/warehouse space in the world, too.) but it's mine and I like it. I like having random things. I like never being fully sure what I'll find in the next box I come to or when I pack my closet 4 years after I (started to) unpack it.

That said, I threw out many many things when we were packing. I threw out lots of old papers. Many trees worth of printouts of info-mac and SF-Lovers digests, made when laser printers at NYU's computing centers were free and it was the easiest way to be able to read them all - not that I ever did...; many old computers (some of which found new homes via reuse or the general Camberville end-of-August scrounge fest)(and 1 I kept, because I want it to go to a good home. Who wants a DEC Rainbow, who will promise to care for it and love it?), the table I inherited from Laurie (Pinsker) Ramey when I moved in to KLG's townhouse after she'd moved out - though I'm still using her bookshelves and I still have the chair I got from Marty Gear which used to live in the KLGAI lobby; and lots and lots of cruft. I feel ok about having purged so much, mostly, but I still have a feeling that there are things I will now never remember again, as their triggers have been removed from my life.

(The Rainbow is also symbolic of something else about my stuff. I care about the fate of much of it. Many things I have I want to go to a good home if I'm no longer going to keep it. I know that not everyone attaches the same sort of significance to things, but if I do, I can guide the fate of things that leave my possession. Not everything, mind you...I know what trash is. I throw it away. Really. I just don't necessarily agree with you on the fine points of the definition.)

(I DO have a dream (queue: Beautiful Dreamer) of managing to sort the stuff before we move again, so that most of the boxes that move out of here contain one category of thing, where that category is better than just "Stuff"...but I'm not holding my breath. At the very least, I want to get my papers in better order. All the old letters and cards and such, all the photos, etc.)

Tomorrow, too fucking early, folks come to haul out their/other people's stuff from our new place, so that we'll finally have room (swap space) to unpack and make this warehouse a home. It'll be tight, but it'll be ok. I've got my family. I've got my stuff. We'll make it.

Your choice of witty closing lines:
We all have our baggage. Mine's just stuff OTHER people can carry for me.
or
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move books. And CDs. And Vinyl. And Cassette tapes. And clothes. And games. And stuff. And cruft. And junk.